


Perquisites of Power

by kenaz



Category: Swordspoint Series - Ellen Kushner
Genre: Gen, Mannerpunk, Riverside
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:27:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kenaz/pseuds/kenaz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alec receives a summons from House Tremontaine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perquisites of Power

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Vae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vae/gifts).



“ _Listen, if you can hear me,” said Alec Campion. “You were right about one thing. The duchess never named me her heir. She believed she was immune to death. Certainly she was very resistant; when it felled her, she stayed breathing for quite some time. They asked her whom she’d chosen, but by then she couldn’t answer. They went through a list of names. Maybe yours was even on it; I don’t know. But when they got to mine, she made a sign with her hand, and they took it for assent.”_

 **\- The Privilege of the Sword**

 

“Enough already!” Alec’s hand clamped around the the serving girl’s wrist, pinning her hand to the table. Her bones shifted beneath the skin as she jerked back in surprise, dropping her dingy rag. “You’re just pushing the dirt around,” he complained. “It’s physically impossible to make these tables clean, so you may as well stop trying. Be _ useful _ and get me another drink.” He pushed his empty mug across the table with his spare hand, adding, as an afterthought, “ _ please _ .” Her head bobbed, and she peered up from beneath a dark fringe of lashes revealing a startled blush. She might be pretty when she was older, Alec thought, if she hadn’t looked at him as if he were going to eat her. He dropped her wrist as quickly as he had grabbed it and stretched out his arm out toward Richard. “Your purse. Give it to me."  


“I think not,” Richard snorted, dodging out of reach. “No work in this weather. They can’t show off their frocks in the rain.” All the same, the hand not engaged with tracing lazy circles on Alec’s knee disappeared into his jerkin, then reappeared with the purse. “Remember, this needs to last us for a while.” It sagged gently in his palm while the fingers of his other hand danced devilishly up the inseam of Alec’s breeches, hinting at earthier delights than mugs of beer. He grinned at Alec’s low hum of contentment before drawing out a couple coppers and sliding them across the table toward the girl. Alec had almost forgotten she was there; Richard’s hand was making a warm spot on his thigh, and drinking was no longer foremost on his mind.

The newcomer burst in on a current of cold air, a swell of rain trailing in behind him. Those closest to the door heralded his arrival with shouts and curses, but Alec was too busy being enthralled by his drink and all the filthy promises Richard breathed into his ear to pay him any mind. He loomed just inside the doorway shaking the rain from his cape-- spattering everyone in the vicinity-- before throwing it back over his shoulders to reveal the livery of Tremontaine. Richard stopped his stroking and gave Alec’s knee a sharp rap. “Someone’s looking for you,” he said, canting his chin toward the door.

Grayson, the Duchess’s footman, stood scraping the muddy bottoms of his shoes-- fine calfskin tipped with steel, the better for clearing paths through crowds or rousting drunks with the audacity to keel over on the carriageway-- against the stone steps with the irritable kicks of a man who would be less than crestfallen if those shoes, accidentally or otherwise, connected with a shin or two.

“Oh, _ honestly-- _ ” Alec flapped his hands irritably. “Go back to what you were saying before. I quite liked the bit about the honey.” He allowed Richard’s hand and voice to hold reality at bay a moment longer. He’d had five letters from Tremontaine, each penned in the cramped and fastidious hand of the duchess’s secretary, in as many days. He’d tossed each one on the fire unopened, watching with  satisfaction  as the wax seal warped and splayed before the paper ignited. Bad enough he’d suffered the harassment of her missives for a week, but the fact that she had chosen to harass him though an intermediary rather than just writing him herself annoyed him further.  


Grayson, drier now, and shoes suitably clean, had begun to survey the room. Alec shifted away from Richard in an attempt to blend in with the tavern walls, buckling into the slouch which had previously served his desire for anonymity so well, but it was much more difficult to hide in plain site without his plain black scholar’s robe. The robe would have been too absurd an affectation--even for Alec-- now that he had been revealed as the grandson of the Duchess Tremontaine, the putative scion who was, by most accounts, as mad as the old Duke himself. Or at least as unpleasant. But he had let his hair grow long again; it reached nearly to his shoulders now, hanging in ragged layers around his face in a style midway between the long straggle of a student’s locks and the managed coifs of the Hill, but was truly neither here nor there. Alec thought suited him; he himself often felt as though he were neither here nor there.

Grayson spotted him quickly, in spite of Alec’s attempt to render himself invisible. The man grasped reflexively for the sword dangling at his side when a bit of half-chewed gristle bounced of his tabard, spat from the mouth of one of the men huddled around the fire, but remembered himself in the brief second before he drew it, letting his clenched fist drop back to his side. Grayson should have counted his blessings, Alec thought. A bit of food on one’s front was better than a knife in one’s back, which would have been a distinct possibility only a scant two years before. But everyone knew that Alec was responsible for getting St Vier off the hook in the Noble’s court, so House Tremontaine got some special dispensation from the rabble-- but that indulgence only stretched so far: Riverside’s collective memory of grudges against the great houses of the Hill who had abused or neglected them far outstripped their memory that Alec had brought down one of the worst of the offenders on their behalf.

“Lord David Campion.”

Grayson had a voice used to shouting and having his shouting obeyed. The men and women at Rosalie’s seemed to take this only as a challenge to make their own conversations louder.

Alec sank back against the bench and groaned. He could feel more than hear the resonant rumble of Richard’s stifled laughter beside him. “For god’s sake, man,” he called out to Grayson, “come over here. You’re ruining the atmosphere.”

Grayson’s gaze made a dubious pass around the room, but he was canny enough not to say what he was thinking. “My lord, we have sent numerous messages for you and have had no reply.”

“For good reason.” Alec drew up straight on the bench now and squared his shoulders, deciding that if he could not be invisible, he would instead be as conspicuous as possible. Grayson’s brows rose expectantly. “I ignored them. I have nothing to say to the duchess, nor she to me.”

Grayson attempted to keep his expression impassive, but Alec could tell he was becoming angry. “Lord David, you must come with me. I have a mandate to retrieve you by force, if necessary.”

“Oh, but that would be so... unseemly.” He hung on the second syllable. “St Vier would be forced to intervene, and the duchess would have to find a new footman-- which is just as well,” he added, looking the man up and down with a gimlet eye. “You’re getting a bit long in the tooth for a footman. She should have made you a steward by now. You are housebroken, aren’t you?”

Grayson’s lips drew together in an intractable line. “The Duchess Tremontaine has fallen ill. Perhaps gravely so. It is imperative that you see her. Immediately.”

  
Alec shook his head, but his voice, when he spoke, was slightly less sharp, wavering just a little with his reply. “Impossible. That woman has a pact with the devil. She believes the laws of nature do not apply to her, and I am inclined to agree.” Though he wouldn’t put it past her to merely feign illness as a ploy. No methods were too unorthodox for her if they proved expedient to her desires. “What sort of force are you _mandated_ to use?” He stood up, a chill quickly settling into his thigh where Richard’s hand had been. “Here,” He threw his arms wide. “Compel away.” But Grayson did not move, and Alec could feel Richard’s eyes boring into his back, twin irritating fingers of guilt and obligation poking him between the shoulder blades.

“My lord, I really must insist,” Grayson growled. It was the sort of tone Alec associated with people who were weighing the pros and cons of pummeling him, and finding the scales beginning to slide decidedly in their favor.

“Oh, fine,” he grunted sullenly, rolling his eyes. He swilled back the last of his beer, then took Richard’s mug and tipped it down for good measure before rising from the table. “Let’s get on with it.”

The footman looked relieved, as if he had been resigned to dealing a blow, but was not wholly invested in getting his hands dirty. He stepped aside and gestured for Alec to precede him. “There is a chaise waiting. The carriage is just across the bridge.”

“I’ll walk.”

Behind him, Richard made an amused sound. Richard often sounded amused. “Don’t be an ass. It’s pouring.”

“I don’t care,” Alec sniffed, gathering himself up. “If I’m lucky, it will still be pouring after I’m done up there. I’ll need the rain to wash away the stink of opulence and corruption. Otherwise, it will linger for days.”

“I’ll get us some fish,” Richard offered. His voice tapered away as Alec skulked toward the door, but Alec could hear the wry timbre of it even as he stepped into the rain. “That smell will cover everything!”

 

~ * ~

 

On the Hill, the sky was the color of a bruise. The rain had soaked Alec to the bone by the time he reached the gates, and though the spring air was mild, he felt chilled. For a brief moment, he cursed his pride and wondered if he should have just taken the chair when Grayson offered it, but when looked at Grayson, bound by duty to accompany him on foot and looking as miserable as a drowned rat, he felt satisfied in his decision.

All along the narrow flower beds that edged the winding drive up to the house crocuses and paperwhites strained through the soil, but many were half obscured by the remnants of dead autumn leaves the groundsmen had made no effort to remove. For the first time, Alec began to wonder if something were truly amiss. Above him, a diffuse light filtered out from behind the diaphanous window-sheers of the duchess’ window like a cataracted eye. When the gate creaked shut behind him and closed with a muted clang, Alec was put in mind of the ornamental birdcages in her solar, of the little menagerie of exotic birds she fussed over and fed out of her hand.

“Well,” he sighed, speaking half to himself and half for Grayson’s benefit, “if the woman is dying, I certainly hope she’ll be quick about it. It’s a long walk back to Riverside, and I’d prefer not to do it in the dark.

Just outside of the Duchess’ chambers, a woman slumped defeatedly in a stiff-backed chair, hunched over a basket of mending to which she applied a most indifferent effort. Hearing the squelch of his footsteps, she looked up.

“Hello, Katherine,” he said. She had aged since he’d last seen her, grown thicker and more complacent under the Duchess’s velvet whip-hand and away from Riverside. Raw, red eyes gave him a long look of contempt mingled with pity, her hands now lying motionless in her lap as if his presence was enough to make her simply surrender altogether. Looking at her, he wondered at the loyalty of Tremontaine’s servants-- was it based on love? Lust? Fear? Gratitude? Maybe it was something else entirely; his own feelings for the woman were certainly complicated enough to defy common definition.

The red flocked walls, tapestries, and heavy bedcurtains made him feel as if he were standing in a giant womb, and as he became of aware of his grandmother’s pale, slender form nearly lost among the bedclothes, he also became aware of the steady tattoo of water falling away from his cuffs and coat-tails; it was the only sound in the room. Her hair was askew, drab against the linens, and he took this as a sign that this was no ploy; her vanity was too great to have allowed anyone to see her so disheveled if she could help it. Alec fought the urge to turn and run.

The Duchess must have sensed this, because she raised a thin arm and beckoned him nearer. He took two steps and stopped. On her bedside table, a number of vials stood in an orderly line, like soldiers. Alec knew what some of them contained: the very substances she had often derided him for using. She had said that they made men weak and stupid and gave them fanciful ideas of uncharted idiocy. Now they stood guard beside her. From this distance, he could see that one side of her face was wrong: her eyelid at half mast, her cheek flaccid, her mouth slack. A very thin line of spittle had begun to leak at the side. She lay nearly invisible in the swath of the crimson coverlet, defanged and declawed, and yet somehow all the more dangerous for it.

“Why is it, David,” she began in a reedy voice, struggling to master each word as it tumbled slurred and slowly from her mouth, “that every time you... deign... to come here, you are ...dripping... all over my floor?”

“Perhaps it’s a portent.” He shrugged with what nonchalance he could muster. “Anyway, Grayson implied you were dying.” He pursed his lips and blew a puff of air out of his nose. “It rains practically every day this time of year. If I waited for the sun, you would have already been dead, and I wouldn’t have had this delightful opportunity to ask which suit you’d like me to wear to the funeral.” He waited for her to respond, but she said nothing, just stared at him with an inscrutable expression. “Is this it, then?” he snapped, unnerved by her silence, by her ruined symmetry. “Your grand exit?”

She blinked her good eye slowly, as if the effort of tolerating his presence was too much to bear. The down pillow deflated slightly beneath her head. “I may...be dying. Yes. I do not know. The physicians won’t tell me.” She stopped again for breath, and to mop the corner of her mouth with the hand that wasn’t laying lifelessly on the eiderdown. “Not a good sign.”

Alec made no move to come closer to the bed yet, preferring to cultivate the puddle spreading out around his feet and winding in sharp, angular paths along the fine seams in the parquetry. “If you still have some repellent notion of naming me your heir, then you’ve wasted my time as well as your own. I want no part of it.” He drew himself up to his full height and lifted his chin stubbornly, but there wasn’t much challenge in facing down a bedridden old woman-- which, to his dismay, was suddenly what she had become.

Even her sigh, when it came at last, was nothing more than an attenuated breath. “You can be so brilliant... when you are not being stupid." The lisped and labored words sounded very little like her, but the underlying contempt was Tremontaine through and through. “I’m disappointed...that in all this time, you have changed... so little.”

“And I’m disappointed that you expected otherwise.” He answered doucely. “My strength lies in my perpetual ability to disappoint those closest to me. I do it exceedingly well. It’s a reputation I’ve spent a lifetime cultivating, and I hardly see the need to change it now-- along with my peculiar talent for infuriating those I dislike.”

“Davey.” She spoke his name like an invocation. “It must be now.” Her good eye blazed fearsomely, too much life trapped within a failing shell. Alec imagined her setting fire to the curtains with the frustrated rage of her captivity gleaming like a torch from that single eye. “No more games.”

“I told you years ago you should have named one of your cow-eyed fancy-boys. What about Michael Godwin?” he demanded, his voice taking on a sharp, taunting edge. “Or the blond-- what was his name? Sansome . Why not him? Or Galing?” He stepped closer to the bed. She had shut her eye as tight as she was able and turned her face away. He was hurting her.   


“Oh,” he went on, unable to stop now that he had started, “but they aren’t here now, are they? They weren’t much interested in your lessons of statecraft once your other charms had withered, were they, and you had taught them them the value of cutting their losses. Well, there’s always Ferris, I suppose...but, ah, yes-- he’s off drinking fermented mare’s milk with the natives and freezing his supercilious arse off in Arkenvelt!” He sat down on the bed, dampening the coverlet. “You are alone, Duchess Tremontaine. All you have to warm that ridiculous bed at night is your money and your power and a house full of servants who jump to your whims because they’ve been paid handsomely to do so.

“But I’m not alone. Not anymore. I have something your title and your money and your power could never bring you.”

“I...underestimated the man’s... capacity for loyalty.”

“You underestimated _me_ ,” Alec shouted, both wounded and furious. “You underestimated my worth to him; you calculate in intrigue, and that is not his currency.” No reply came, no subtly pointed retort; she was goading him into a storm with her silence. “Twice I’ve sold you my soul-- once for the University and once to save Richard. I won’t do it again!”

A bitter smile curved up the mobile side of her mouth, and he saw that despite her weakness she still had the capacity to harm him. He thought of the birds in their cages in the solar, beating their wings in futility against the bars before they accepted their fate, bits of fruit and seed taken straight from the palm of their captor’s hand.

“Yes,” she whispered, half a hiss, “you will.”

“No I won’t!” Alec rose vehemently from the bed like a startled crow. He looked for something to throw, to smash, but there was nothing to hand save the little vials on her bedside table. “Damn you!” he shouted. Beyond the door he could hear the shuffle of footsteps; perhaps Katherine or Grayson planned to break down the door and haul him away. He almost hoped that they would. “I’ll waste every cent on gambling and whores and hideous suits before you're cold in your tomb! I’ll take my place on the Council meetings and vote down _ every single thing  _ you and Halliday and all your other little pets have ever worked to create. I will destroy every alliance House Tremontaine has ever claimed.” He was shouting wildly now, all semblance of rationality flown, replaced by fear and anger and utter frustration. The red walls closed in around him and he could hardly breathe. “I’ll fund an astronomy chair in your name at the University. I’ll have St Vier geld Godwin for sport. I’ll fill your precious manor with pornographic statues and naked serving boys and decorate the ballroom with a chandelier made out of rusted shackles and the leg bones of all my enemies before I burn it to the ground.”  


“My ballroom is not that big,” the Duchess countered archly, the half-smile still rising on one cheek, “And this house is made of stone.”

“No.” The word came out like a whine, a plea for mercy Tremontaine did nothing to acknowledge.

The eight-sided pendant bearing the device of the house hung about her neck on a gold chain, resting against her withered bosom. He made a stunted sob when he came close to her and picked it up, felt the weight of it in his hand. He could still smell the lingering jasmine from the perfume in her hair, but also the cloying stink of medicine and decay. With the utmost of care, he turned the chain to find the clasp, sliding it over the crepe of her neck, the skin yielding to it where once it had been firm. He opened the clasp and let the emblem fall into his hand.

The Duchess made a soft sound-- “Ah!”-- and feebly raised her head. Her hand trembled with a palsy Alec knew would not abate. “ So it  is done” she said. “You will take on your duty.”  


Alec looked at the  medal for a long time, weighed it, felt the edges of it gouging his palm when he closed his fingers around it. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Her arm, bird-boned and fleshless, stretched toward him-- but it was neither long enough nor strong enough to touch him.  


“No.” He stood abruptly and dropped the medallion on her bedside table. It rolled in smaller and smaller circles on the inlaid wood until it rattled to rest. “No, I don’t think I shall.”

He leaned forward again, very close to her, and slipped the heavy chain, naked of its symbol, off her neck. “There are no jobs for Richard in this weather,” he explained, slipping the chain into his pocket. “This will tide us over.” She had said nothing about his refusal, but her face had begun to turn a violent shade of red, her strong left eye fixing him with a glare of such intensity Alec could almost feel his skin beginning to burn. He turned to go-- there really wasn’t much else to discuss, he thought-- but stopped short. He returned to the bedside and leaned down. “I’m sorry, Grandmother,” he told her, planting a kiss on each cheek, “Truly, I am.”

Straightening up, he glanced at the rows of vials - there were a couple pricey ones there; they'd buy a few cords of wood and some nice beeswax candles. They’d also buy him more than a few nights of delightful oblivion, swirling hours when he could put an entire universe, stars and all, between himself and  _ this _ . He added them to the bounty in his pocket. The long wet trip up here wouldn't be completely wasted.  


 

**Author's Note:**

> Many, *many* thanks to Just_Ann_Now for the swift and eagle-eyed beta work-- not once, but twice!


End file.
